What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in ...

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What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public High Schools

Too many students in Chicago Public Schools and nationally fail to graduate from high school. It is a problem that can sometimes feel overwhelming to address because the causes of dropout are myriad and complex. What is often lost in discussions about dropping out is the one factor that is most directly related to graduation--students' performance in their ninth grade courses. In this research report, UChicago Consortium authors Elaine M. Allensworth and John Q. Easton look into the elements of freshman course performance that predict whether students will graduate and suggest what educators can do to keep more teens in school.

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UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH & APPLYING DATA

NCS FRESHMAN ON-TRACK TOOLKIT

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CONSORTIUM ON CHICAGO SCHOOL RESEARCH

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Research Report

July 2007

What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public High Schools

A Close Look at Course Grades, Failures, and Attendance in the Freshman Year

Elaine M. Allensworth John Q. Easton

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully thank their research colleagues at the Consortium on Chicago School Research for advice and helpful suggestions from early to final stages of this work. We would particularly like to thank Steve Ponisciak for his thorough technical reading of the report. Penny Sebring, Melissa Roderick, and Holly Hart reviewed earlier drafts. Staff at the Chicago Public Schools and Consortium Steering Committee members helped develop the major themes in this study. We particularly thank Steering Committee members Arie van der Ploeg and Josie Yanguas for their comments on our work. Two external reviewers, Valerie Lee, University of Michigan, and Tom Hoffer, NORC at the University of Chicago, carefully examined the statistical analyses and provided extensive feedback. Finally, we very gratefully acknowledge the Chicago Public Schools for providing us the data that allowed us to do this work.

This work was supported by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public High Schools

Table of Contents

Introduction......................................................................................... 1

Chapter 1: A Close Look at Course Grades, Failures, and Absences

in the Freshman Year..................................................................................... 3

Chapter 2: What Matters for Grades and Failure in the Freshman Year:

Student Backgrounds and Behaviors....................................................... 15

Chapter 3: What Matters for Grades, Failure, and Attendance:

School Practices................................................................................... 25 Chapter 4: Interpretive Summary..........................................................37 References.......................................................................................... 45 Appendix A: Individual School Data......................................................48 Appendix B: Description of Survey Measures............................................ 53 Appendix C: Correlations Involving Survey Measures................................56 Appendix D: Summaries of Models......................................................... 59

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consortium on chicago school research at the university of chicago

Introduction

Improving graduation rates and reducing dropout rates are high-priority items on the national agenda for high school reform. There is increasing recognition that a high school diploma is a minimum requirement for success in the workplace and that too few students obtain this minimum standard.1 Yet, it is a problem that can sometimes feel overwhelming to try to manage. In part, this is because of the magnitude of the problem: nationally, nearly one-third of students do not graduate from high school.2 Almost half the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students fail to graduate from high school, and in some CPS high schools more students drop out than graduate.3 These numbers underscore the urgency of addressing this issue immediately.

The dropout problem is also difficult to manage because its causes are many and complex. Research on dropping out has shown that the decision to persist in or leave school is affected by multiple contextual factors-- family, school, neighborhood, peers--interacting in a cumulative way over the life course of a student.4 This suggests a daunting task for dealing with the problem of dropout--if so many factors are involved in the decision to drop out of school, including experiences outside of school and in early grades, how can any high school effort substantially address the problem?

What is often lost in discussions about dropping out is the one factor that is most directly related to graduation--students' performance in their courses. In Chicago, we have shown that inadequate credit accumulation in the freshman year, which usually results from course failures, is highly predictive of failing to graduate four years later. Research in New York City has shown very similar connections between inadequate credit accumulation and eventual dropping out, and national data confirms this; almost all students who drop out leave school far behind in course credits.5 As we

consortium on chicago school research at the university of chicago

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document here in more detail, success in high school coursework is directly tied to eventual graduation. Knowing that graduation is directly tied with course grades suggests two potential strategies for addressing dropout problems. At the very least, we can use freshman course performance to identify students at high risk of dropping out to target with support and intervention. At the most, if schools and teachers can influence the quality of students' performance in their coursework, then they have a direct lever to affect graduation rates--a lever that should simultaneously improve student achievement.

In this report, we look closely at students' performance in their coursework during their freshman year, how it is related to eventual graduation, and how personal and school factors contribute to success or failure in freshman-year courses. We show that data on course performance can be used to identify future dropouts and graduates with precision, and we compare performance indicators to discern how they might be used for nuanced targeting of students at-risk of dropping out. We examine the factors that contribute to course performance in the freshman year, showing that success in coursework is affected more by what students do while they are in high school than by their preparation for high school and backgrounds. Finally, we provide evidence that teachers and schools matter for how students perform in their courses, and that efforts to reduce dropout rates are consistent with initiatives to address low achievement.

We focus on the freshman year because our prior work, and work by others, has shown that course

performance in the freshman year sets the stage for eventual graduation. This report builds on a report we released June 2005 that described and defined the "freshman on-track indicator." In that report, we showed the relationship between being on-track at the end of the freshman year and graduating from high school four and five years later. On-track students had at least ten semester credits (five full-year course credits) and no more than one semester F in a core course by the end of their first year in high school. Students who were on-track at the end of their freshman year were nearly four times more likely to graduate from high school than their classmates who were not on-track.6

The original on-track report provided initial evidence that we could use freshman-year course performance to precisely identify future dropouts. While it was a key validation of the on-track indicator, it left a number of unanswered questions: Why is the indicator predictive? Why are students off-track? And what might high schools themselves contribute to students' course performance? Furthermore, that report only examined whether students were making minimal progress in their freshman year, which meant whether they were earning sufficient credits to be on-track for promotion to the tenth grade. But we want students to graduate from high school ready for college and work, which means we should aim for students doing A and B quality work.7 In this report, we pull apart a variety of indicators of freshman course performance--including students' failures, absences, and overall grades--to learn what matters for a successful freshman year.

Introduction Endnotes

1 E.g., Orfield (2004); Barton (2005); National Association of Secondary School Principles (2005). 2 Swanson (2004). 3 Allensworth (2005). 4 Rumberger (2004); Alexander, Entwisle, and Kabbani (2001). 5 Cahill, Hamilton, and Lynch (2006); National Center for Education Statistics (2007). 6 Research in Philadelphia has also shown that course performance in the eighth and ninth grades can be used to identify dropouts years before they leave school (see work by Robert Balfanz, Ruth Curran Neild, and Lisa Herzog). For example, using detailed records on students, Neild and Balfanz (2005) used attendance and failure in the eighth and ninth grades to identify dropouts in Philadelphia. As in Chicago, they found that test scores were not as predictive of graduation as students' performance in their coursework.

7 As documented in the CCSR report, From high school to the future: A first look at CPS graduates' college enrollment, college preparation, and graduation from four-year colleges, students with a GPA lower than a 2.0 are unlikely to enroll in college, and those with a GPA lower than 3.0 are unlikely to obtain a four-year degree. Grades are also very predictive of future earnings (Miller, 1998).

2 What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public High Schools

1 Chapter

A Close Look at Course Grades, Failures, and Absences in the Freshman Year

As a measure of minimally adequate performance, the on-track indicator groups together marginally successful students and very successful ones. Knowing that the on- and off-track groups both contain students with widely differing course performances, we decided to explore what aspects of being off-track made students less likely to graduate, and if more nuanced indicators of course performance--such as number of course failures, GPA, or absences--might be better predictors of eventual graduation. We begin this chapter by examining these other indicators of course performance as predictors of graduation. We then use the other indicators to look more closely at what it means to be off-track.

A Number of Freshman-Year Indicators Can Be Used to Predict High School Graduation

The on-track indicator is highly predictive of graduation, but it is a blunt indicator; and the requisite data to construct the indicator are not available until the end of a student's first year in high school. Schools and districts often ask if there are other indicators that could be used to forecast graduation. In fact, there are several related measures of how well students do during their freshman year that are equally predictive and more readily available, including freshman-year GPA, the number of semester course failures, and freshman-year absences.

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Freshman Course Performance Among CPS Students

This report analyzes several different, but related, indicators of freshman-year performance. Each is defined below, along with summary figures that show the performance of first-time ninth-graders in the 2004?05 school year (24,894 students). We include only students who remained in school through spring of their freshman year.

The 2005 report on the on-track indicator showed that freshman-year course performance has improved over the last decade in CPS; on-track rates improved from 50 percent with the 1994?95 freshman class to 60 percent with the 2003?04 class (excluding first-year dropouts), while freshman-course pass rates improved from 76 to 81 percent over the same period.A However, as detailed below, one cannot escape the conclusion that, in general, freshmen in CPS still do very poorly; more than half of freshmen fail a course, the average GPA is below a C, and absence rates are very high--40 percent of freshmen miss more than four weeks of school (including class cutting). The statistics would sound even worse if we included freshmen dropouts in the calculations. For many students, freshman year is like a bottleneck-- their performance is so poor that they are unable to recover. These negative experiences in freshman year put students at high risk of not graduating, which later prevents them from participating in the mainstream economy and larger society. We cannot hope to substantially improve graduation rates unless we substantially improve students' course performance in their freshman year.

On-Track: A student is considered on-track if he or she has accumulated five full credits (ten semester credits) and has no more than one semester F in a core subject (English, math, science, or social science) by the end of the first year in high school. This is an indicator of the minimal expected level of performance. Students in CPS need 24 credits to graduate from high school, so a student with only 5 credits at the end of freshman year will need to pass courses at a faster rate in later years. The definition

is aligned with the CPS promotion policy for moving from freshman to sophomore year, which only requires five full credits. In the 2004?05 freshman class, 59 percent of first-time high school students were on-track while 41 percent were off-track (excluding students who dropped out before the end of their first year in high school).

Number of Semester Course Failures: In this report, we measure failures across all courses by semester. This differs from the on-track indicator, which only incorporates failures in core subjects (reading, math, science, and social science); this report examines overall course performance, not just performance in core courses. A typical student takes 7 courses each semester; thus, a typical student could fail as many as 14 courses in a year. Figure 1 graphs the number of semester courses failed by first-time freshmen in the 2004?05 school year, excluding students who dropped out before the end of their first year in high school. The modal category of failures is 0; however, more than half the CPS freshmen (53 percent) fail at least one course.

Figure 1

NumFibgeurreo1f .CNouumrsbeerFoafilCuoreursseAmFaoilnugreFsrAemshomngeFnreinsh2m0e0n4i-n052004-05

Percentage of Students

50% 47%

45%

40%

35%

30%

25%

20%

15%

12%

12%

10%

8%

6%

5%

4% 4% 3% 4%

0

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8+

Number of Semester Course Failures

4 What Matters for Staying On-Track and Graduating in Chicago Public High Schools

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